Project: Brand Refresh
The company's overall brand health was not at its strongest. We identified inconsistencies in branding visuals, external communications, and project development as key areas of concerns. The project's goal is to revamp the company's branding efforts by creating clear guidelines for more cohesive and effective executions.
The project's execution plans encompassed both internal and external initiatives.
The Issues:
Identified inconsistencies in our visuals, such as the use of green in ads instead of our core colors (blue, white, black), and the inclusion of an outdated logo and tagline.
Identified external communications and customer service responses lacked a standard template, font, font size and company-wide signature.
Identified alack of structure in project development, with no clear guidelines for partnership communications and workflow for internal employees.
The Solutions:
Built out a brand guide with the creative team, establishing clear guidelines on all external facing logo, fonts and colors. Educate and encourage an "always-on" mindset when creating any public facing materials. This includes ads, social media posts and in-app landing page.
Collaborated with the CRM team to develop a standardized response template for customer inquiries. Partnered with the creative team to design an email signature format, along with font and font size. Coordinated a company-wide update request with the IT department.
Encouraged brand consistency enforcement within the marketing team by identifying and addressing any irregular email formats.
Support is then provided to ensure adherence to the established guidelines.
Created easily accessible links to a database of PowerPoint templates and general guidelines, ensuring that all public communications with partners adhered to the standardized format. A Business Requirements Document (BRD) was also developed, assigning specific section ownership to ensure accountability and clear responsibility for each part of the project.
Measuring Results
Template Utilization & Adherence
Track how often the PowerPoint templates are accessed or used by the team and partners. This can be measured through analytics on the database or document management system.
Monitor how consistently the marketing team and partners follow the template guidelines in communications through regular audits.
Measure any discrepancies or formatting errors in advertisements, social media posts, email communications or presentations that deviate from the template.
Accountability & Project Ownership
Collect feedback from the team on how the BRD has affected accountability, noting improvements in coordination, responsibility, and project ownership.
Partner Engagement
External Communications:
Evaluate whether the branding and message alignment with partners has improved, through surveys with team leads
Internal Efficiency
Track the reduction in formatting or messaging errors in partner communications as a result of standardized templates.
Merch Design
The company experienced significant growth in late 2020 / early 2021, leading to a demand for company branded merch. At the time, the company was only about three years old to the public, and customers were eager to associate themselves with an emerging company - viewing it as a social statement of being ahead of the curve.
This project was assigned at a time when COVID restrictions were just starting to ease, and people were beginning to feel hopeful again. I wanted to design merch that would bring a smile to anyone who wore it.
Drawing inspirations from the 2019 Met Gala Theme, Camp: Notes on Fashion, I designed the graphic with the company's logo stylized like an American currency bill. I wanted to incorporate humor while also promoting the company's product offerings.
These merch were distributed to our customers through various promotions, tournaments, and giveaways. We received positive feedback about the merch and some even requested to buy them!
Employees also received these merch, and till this day, you can still spot employees rocking the t-shirts or using the beach towel as light blankets when the AC gets a little too chilly!
Brand Awareness Survey
We wanted to understand the health, perception, and awareness of the company's brand by analyzing customer opinions on our product, services, and marketing initiatives. The insights we gained from conducting these survey allowed us to refine the company's messaging and creative strategies to better engage out audience.
The surveys also helped us assessed the company's market presence: why does a customer use the company's product? Do they recognize the brand? Do they recommend it?
One of the surveys we conducted was focused on evaluating the effectiveness of our out-of-home advertising. We aggressively invested in out-of-home ads for a period of time, and wanted to assess their last impact on customers in the tri-state area.
We surveyed over 25,000 customers and received approximately 10,100 completed responses. The completion percentage was lower than we expected, which we noted and discussed.
Some factors that may have contributed to the lack of participation were: (1) lack of guaranteed incentive (only two random customers would have the chance to receive a company swag pack), and (2) length of survey.
The survey included questions such as:
Were you aware of the company before seeing the ad?
Did you scan the QR code on the ad to learn more? If not, why?
Our findings indicated that while many of our customers saw the out-of-home ads during that period, majority of them did not choose to scan the QR code. They preferred to research the company on their own. Additionally, we discovered a significant of our customers did not see any of these ads during that period but were already familiar or customers of the company.
These information were shared with our advertising and creative teams to better curate upcoming campaigns.
*Please note that as this is a relatively recent project, I am unable to share specific numbers and data from these findings at this time.